Divided We Stand

Yesterday I said I'd offer up some fuller thoughts on Kevin Drums notion that Democrats actually are in agreement about national security matters. One slight problem with Kevin's view, I think, is that it comes with the proviso that only "if you take out, say, the Chomsky wing on the left and the Lieberman wing on the right," then you find that "there's a surprising amount that the rest of us agree on." In part it gets a little tautological to say that if you take a political movement, then remove its dissident elements, what you're left with is unity. That aside, though, there is something to Kevin's notion. But also, I think, something wrong with it.

The unity he's talking about has been purchased at the price of a great deal of vagueness. Now there's always going to be vagueness coming from politicians who have an understandable desire to avoid getting themselves pinned down. Which is fine, politics is politics. But if you watch the community of non-politicians in the progressive camp, you'll find people who do articulate more specific ideas. And while either set of ideas can be fitted into the same overarching framework of platitutdes, they're genuinely different ideas. I thought one useful way of exploring this might be for me to talk a little bit about Peter Beinart's book, The Good Fight. There are a few reasons for this. One is simply that the book took a lot of criticism from bloggers for what I think were sort of the wrong reasons. Another is that my book is going to be on a similar sort of subject, but is going to reach substantially different conclusions. Last, Beinart's a good case precisely because he's fully disavowed the Iraq War, but I think still falls on the "hawk" side of an enduring divide within mainstream liberalism so looking at his ideas is a good way of showing that disagreement isn't just disagreement about Iraq.

On the relatively specific issue of combatting the al-Qaeda movement, the crux of the issue is this. Beinart, like many most progressives who found themselves in the pro-invasion camp, has developed a certain degree of skepticism about the utility of military force in coping with the problem. This is all to the good. He retains, however, a belief in the basic view of the problem that drove support for the invasion of Iraq. Specifically, he continues to believe that America's strategy toward confronting the al-Qaeda movement should be centered around trying to bring about large-scale socio-political transformation of the Islamic world. This is a view that some people who were never believers in the Iraq War also maintain in one form or another. Shadi Hamid's recent article for The American Prospect Online qualifies, I would say.

On this view, the Muslim world is afflicted by a kind of cultural sickness that, thanks to globalization, immigration, and the open nature of western societies is capable of infecting us. To cope with the threat we need to act aggressively to treat the patient. This could take the form of military action (unilateral or otherwise) or "transformational diplomacy," efforts to fund certain groups here or there, big Marshall Plan-style funding campaigns, or any number of other things.

Basically, I would dispute that analysis and adopt an analysis closer to the consensus I saw on view at an enlightening panel discussion I attended this morning.

On my view, the central problem vis-a-vis the United States and the Muslim world is the enduring legacy of imperialism. There are a number of modalities to this. The continuing American occupation of Iraq is one. The Israeli occupation of Arab lands is another. The secessionist conflicts in Kashmir, Chechnya, and the Philipines also count. So does the American habit of locating military bases in Arab countries with the consent of the local monarchs (typically installed by retreating British colonial authorities) but against the will of the local population. All this, in turn, relates in a broad sense to American efforts to micromanage the balance of power in the Persian Gulf region in increasingly intrusive ways.

Mitigating the threat posed by the al-Qaeda movement, on this view, requires us to wind down the various concrete political conflicts that al-Qaeda stitches together into a generic clash of civilizations narrative. It also requires us not to transform our Arab allies into democracies, but to broadly disentangle ourselves from our perceived role as regional string-pullers and the power behind the throne.

Beinart, conveniently enough, does me the favor of labeling what he regards as the left-deviationists within the Democratic camp as the "anti-imperialist" faction of progressive politics. I think it's a good label, since "imperialism" is precisely the label I'd like to pin on folks on the other side. Unfortunately, Beinart seems to see a fairly crude sort of isolationism as the only viable alternative to imperialism. I would say that liberals have at our disposal an appealing third option -- liberalism -- the continuing effort to slowly-but-surely construct a liberal order in which international affairs are increasingly governed through institutions.

In his book, Beinart -- like Francis Fukuyama coming at the problem from a different direction in his book -- has engaged in a kind of rediscovery of institutions. But he sees the value of institutions as overwhelmingly instrumental. They help grant American actions legitimacy, or perhaps the appearance of legitimacy, which, in practice, turns out to be important. This drives what I would characterize as an undue level of interest in institutional proliferation, what Fukuyama calls multi-multilateralism. What this amounts to, I think, is a desire to open up as many opportunities as possible for forum shopping so that the United States can appear to have subordinated its will to rule-governed institutional processes while, in fact, retaining the substance of unilateral hegemony.

That's the attitude I called "smarter, more effective imperialism" with reference to Nancy Soderbergh. And I think it really is smarter and, for a while, would genuinely prove more effective than the extraordinary crudeness of Bush's conduct of the country's affairs. It would be better to see the country move to that kind of position. I don't, however, think that those sort of policies will genuinely solve the problem or provide a long-term basis for peace, prosperity, and security.

I also don't think a political argument that's predominantly about techniques is especially promising. From moment one, you essentially wind up too thick in the weeds for voters to listen to what you're saying or care about what you're trying to do. The upshot of that is going to be a GOP advantage simply because they have a generic edge on national security issues and have for a long time. A bigger, broader argument about vision and principle would, by contrast, be hard to win. But I think it would at least be possible. And it would also serve the country better.

Comments

Can you please clarify how your viewpoint is different than Pat Buchanan's? Or is it the same?

Posted by: niraj on September 8, 2006 02:19 PM

Niraj: "Unfortunately, Beinart seems to see a fairly crude sort of isolationism as the only viable alternative to imperialism. I would say that liberals have at our disposal an appealing third option -- liberalism -- the continuing effort to slowly-but-surely construct a liberal order in which international affairs are increasingly governed through institutions."

Posted by: David Weman on September 8, 2006 02:48 PM

I think Wes Clark had a piece in the Washington Monthly on the difficulties that the US and the UK had as former and present imperial powers in the Middle East, comparing them in fact to the USSR in Eastern Europe. Plus you will want to look at Anatol Lieven's book America Right or Wrong.

More important: Your sketch here is clarifyingly negative but in positive terms your suggestion is only procedural: the US should not be imperialist, but should involve itself in governing international affairs through institutions. But what outcome are you proposing for those military bases, US oil interests (not on your list, but I assume not neglected in your book), Chechnya, Israeli occupation of Arab lands and so forth? Are the Arabs/Islamic world etc going to be able to use these institutions to remove US oil interests, remove military bases, remove all the Israeli settlers on the land conquered in 1967 including around Jerusalem etc? Or are they not? And if they can't, why will be institutions be acceptable? Wont they be another Baghdad Pact?

Posted by: otto on September 8, 2006 02:51 PM

It looks to me to be precisely the opposite of Pat Buchanan's, niraj. Pat is an isolationist. Instead, Matthew seems to be in favor of world government. Or at least that's what I take from this.

Matthew likes multilateral institutions. OK. But he doesn't like multiple small multilateral institutions that the US can forum shop and dominate. (Perhaps this is what led to yesterday's post about Argenitina and the IMF?) So what's the alternative? One big multilateral institution that the US can't dominate. Or am I missing something?

Posted by: Al on September 8, 2006 02:53 PM

Its nice to see the debate moving from the woeful "benign hegemon" that some on the left are all too pleased to characterize the US as and locate the real problem being the imperial legacy. My only problem, and this is a pretty big one, is the idea that the global spread of liberalism somehow serves as a bulwark against neo-imperialism.

Sure its easy to label this position as one of the "dissident left," but those supposedly against US hegemony have done a less than spectacular job of arguing exactly how liberalism, multi-lateralism etc. actually counteracts hegemonization rather than serving as a patina for further US imperial aggression.

Posted by: Yair on September 8, 2006 03:09 PM

Gawd help me. If your summary of Beinart as favoring "smarter, more effective imperialism" is correct, then he's where I am. That can't be good. Your book better be rigorous and convincing, Yglesias.

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim on September 8, 2006 03:10 PM

Geez--so it's cowboy unilateralism or world federalism, is it? America as Dirty Harry or as Gulliver? I think Matt's book will have a slightly longer word count than that. And I think--not to be a spoiler or anything--that it might involve developing a frame for thinking about when, how, and how not to engage in international institution-building. I bet it will also wrestle with the reality that you can't just talk the talk (see, inter alia, Bush 43's unhinged second inaugural address)--you have to figure out how to walk the walk. These--and a way to talk about a liberal international order in ways that effectively communicate its deep prudential wisdom to an electorate in love with action figures--are desperately needed ideas.

Posted by: Ben on September 8, 2006 03:22 PM

Let's please use the "i" word. I hate to think of the USA as an empire, but lordamitey, we sure act like one. And again, not in the "everything America does is bad" sense, but in the literal sense of having bases all around the world. I don't think these bases are worth shit, and they sure piss of the locals (OBL, for instance) plenty. It still takes weeks to deploy the serious fighting forces. The bases are just expensive outposts. We have aircraft carrier groups,etc. We should have zeros bases in the middle east. If Iran invades Iraq or Iraq invades Kuwait again, we can always come back. In those cases we'd be welcomed.

Seriously, the evildoers don't hate our freedom, etc. They just want us the fuck out. Let's just go.

Posted by: Chris on September 8, 2006 03:31 PM

Matt will answer for himself. But the one difference that stands out for me the emphasis on "the continuing effort to slowly-but-surely construct a liberal order in which international affairs are increasingly governed through institutions." This is no part of Buchanan's view of the world.

Posted by: Dan Kervick on September 8, 2006 03:35 PM

Off-topic RSS coment,

Matt, now that you've switched to a snippet-only RSS feed it would be nice if the link on the feed would take you to the story on the front page instead of the permalink with the comments, that way readers can click on the story and then read up from there for the other posts, instead of having to go back and forth from the RSS reader for each post. This is how Josh does it at talkingpointsmemo.com and it's a lot more convenient. OTOH, I guess you get more pageviews this way, but at the expense of my convenince :-P

Posted by: Miguel on September 8, 2006 03:41 PM

To much of the world, the US is the imperial villain. Sadly, isolationalism is the only course for the short term. Once Bush is out of office, and the Americans competently help those in need after natural disasters, the world community might be willing to listen to what we say.

Posted by: Mal on September 8, 2006 03:44 PM

At some level, America has been an empire for a while now, whether we like it or not. And compared to anything in the past, we've been a pretty darn good empire as well, even with all the corruption that came along with the power.

But that can't and won't last forever. I think one thing everyone needs to realize is the U.S. will not be the king of the hill forever. Even if we stay as rich as we've been, the rest of the world is (and should!) catch up. But we do have still have overwhelming power and influence for the time being, even with Bush pissing so much of it away. We have the ability to largely determine what the world will look like 100 years from now, after our own influence has largely gone away. Assuming PAX America is not a possibility going forward much longer, what world do we want to live in?

My #1 biggest issue with Bush is he is creating a world of cowboys and gunfights, where might makes right while simultaneously weakening our power to change directions.

Posted by: Mark on September 8, 2006 04:03 PM

Politically, I think the Yglesias platform would likely be a tough sell, because it plays into the worst stereotypes people already have about liberals… any Democratic politician who runs on a foreign policy based around anti-imperialist multilateralism will instantly be caricatured as a cut and run, blame America first wimp who cares more about placating the French then protecting Americans. So at the very least, those ideas will need to be framed a little differently.

On the substance, I don’t think there’s a single cause to our problems, or a single solution. The legacy of imperialism is a causal factor, but it’s not the only one. Similarly, there’s no either/or choice between trying to end the conflicts in Palestine/Kashmir/Chechnya, strengthening multilateral institutions, and engaging in transformational diplomacy. We should be doing all of them.

Posted by: RC on September 8, 2006 04:19 PM

And then there's the oil situation. Will your book touch on this. and/or on other material aspects (or driving forces) of US imperialism?

Posted by: mary on September 8, 2006 04:22 PM

If you define the "the Lieberman right" as people who share Lieberman's POLICY choices but not necessarily his pro-Bush rhetoric, then a majority of the party's Congressional delegation is in the Lieberman right.

Posted by: digamma on September 8, 2006 06:22 PM

There's a reason that American imperialism is disliked: any imperialist is going to be disliked. And there's a reason for that state of affairs that cannot be finessed away by erudite phraseology or convincing "frame". Imperialists of the noblest mettle become less noble over time. The fleecing of the US gov't and the Iraqis by the CPA during the sway of the CPA showed that Americans just skipped the part about becoming "less noble over time" and just dipped right into the ignoble stuff from the get go. Paging Lord Acton!

All the effort to try to work up good reasons for doing potentially ignoble things and hoping for the best are going to turn out badly. The best thing to do is going to remain the best thing to do: only use force when you've got no other choice.

Posted by: Jeffrey Davis on September 8, 2006 06:49 PM

I hope that you will spend a little time describing the mechanism by which international institutions are going to achieve the outcomes you want in the Middle East or elsewhere. For example, the WTO offers a sort of tit-for-tat linkage between importers and exporters where exporters know that if they don't restrain importers wanting protection, exports will suffer. It's that linkage mechanism, not the fact that there's a secretariat and a building in Geneva (?) which is what drives the usefulness of the WTO. You need to think of the underlying mechanism in relation to the Middle East, and then put, as it were, an institution on top of it.

Posted by: otto on September 8, 2006 07:00 PM

What is this total nonsense about "isolationism"? Things are so bad in our public discourse that anyone who thinks we should stop killing foreigners is an "isolationist". No one is saying you can't visit other countries, or trade with them, or marry attractive foreign women, or translate foreign books, or spend junior year abroad in Prague, or whatever you want to do really. In fact, we might find that once we stopped bombing other countries they would be more, not welcoming to us. There are dozens of countries now that an American can't visit safely because of our foreign policy, and American embassies everywhere are walled-off fortresses, isolated from the cities they are located in. Perhaps that's the real "isolationism".

Posted by: MQ on September 8, 2006 07:12 PM

Umm, that should read "more, not less, welcoming to us".

Posted by: MQ on September 8, 2006 07:14 PM

Sounds to me that Matthew is drifting towards a kind of "American unexceptionalism." Some dimensions of world life require multilateral institutions. Some are best left to sovereign nation states pursuing self-interest. But wherever you draw that line for France or Russia, you draw that same line for the US. So far I like it.

The "legacy of imperialism" meme though, sounds a lot like post-colonial dictatorships justifying themselves on the basis of the past. It is a lot like the legacy of Tsarism or capitalism in Soviet discourse. Sure, history leaves us with problems (botched partitions, botched unifications).

But the real problem with the project to transform the Muslim world may not be about the past, but the present. Maybe Muslims don't want to be transformed. Sure, they will doubtless imitate some aspects of Western culture, technology and possibly even economic and political institutions. But they are unlikely to see it as the picture of their own future -- to the extent they do, they will tend to become angry and frightened, since they will see this prospect as a dystopian one.

Pat Buchanan is basically right this far: coercively transforming the Muslim world is not in the West's interests, nor is it moral, nor is it likely to work.

Posted by: Pithlord on September 8, 2006 07:21 PM

Exactly, Pithlord. Buchanan's got it.

Posted by: MQ on September 8, 2006 07:26 PM

Watch it Pithlord. David Brooks tried arguing that maybe Arabs or Muslims didn't want to live under democracy after all, and Matthew said that meant Brooks was calling Arabs and Muslims "subhuman".

Posted by: Al on September 8, 2006 07:47 PM

Gosh I don't see the legacy of imperialism and the cultural sickness or pathology views as excluding each other. It could even be that the truth of the former is a contributing cause to the truth of the latter. Still I'm with MY's liberal conclusion if I've understood it properly: our interests, by which I mean the citizens of the US, and citizens of other countries in the world are best served by ' the continuing effort to slowly-but-surely construct a liberal order in which international affairs are increasingly governed through institutions [that promote peace, international cooperation and, in unglamorous ways, e.g., more by creating an attractive example than by intervention, help spread democratic valuse]' i.e., something like what the US as a founding member of the UN and a signatory to many treaties had repeatedly committed itself before the Bush might makes right era.

Posted by: J on September 8, 2006 08:32 PM

What is this total nonsense about "isolationism"? Things are so bad in our public discourse that anyone who thinks we should stop killing foreigners is an "isolationist".

MQ is precisely right. Calling a move away from the prodigal use of lethal military force "isolationism" is playing into rhetorical hands of the hawks. They want to frighten Americans into thinking that the only alternative to militarism and aggressive overseas intervention is locking ourselves away in our bedrooms like some neurotic, latter-day Emily Dickensons. They euphemistically call their own policy one of "engagement".

That's a crazy perspective. It is rather the skeptics about the current aggressive interventionist posture who favor a healthy engagement with the world. There are many perfectly normal and successful countries in the world, who relate in an open and constructive manner with other countries in the world, and yet who do not have their soldiers "engaged" in blowing up things in multiple foreign lands.

Rather than letting the hawks say that their opponents favor "isolationism," why don't we say instead that the hawks favor "intrusionismism"? Rather than letting them get away with calling their preferred course "engagement," why don't we say instead that they are suffering from "derangement"?

Posted by: Dan Kervick on September 8, 2006 08:40 PM

Any policy that tells Americans they don't have more privileges than other nations, especially nations full of non-white people, will be overwhelmingly rejected by the voters for the rest of my lifetime. I'm 57.
I'd be willing to bet it will be overwhelmingly rejected by the voters for the rest of your lifetime, too, Matt, and I know you're some younger than me.
Only military defeat (unlikely) or economic catastrophe (more likely) that IMPOSES a less imperial and belligerent foreign policy on this nation will alter that fundamental truth/

Posted by: Michael Gee on September 9, 2006 11:40 AM

Policywise, I agree with Matt more than I expected to.

Politically, I think that the main reason s Democrats lose are the Republican penetration of the media, the dynamite Republican political machine (which controls pork distribution and most policy-making), and the Republican alternate media (think tanks and money-losing fringe publications). These will be the ones who label Democrats as hippie pacifist cowards, and unless Democrats have a counterforce in place, we will lose.

The Republican political apparatchiks are happy to work with sympathetic members of the military-intelligence establishment (excluding the CIA these days), and militarism is part of the Republican campaign mix. Between the two, America's permanent mobilization (since 1941) has been bent in a very unfavorable direction, but even quite recently liberal internationalists have played an only slightly different game (e.g., Bzrezinski still defends US support of Islamofascism [/irony] in the Afghan-Soviet War).

The military-intelligence complex is a major interest group (3% of GDP? 5%), and they're very media-savvy and politically astute. Fighting them will be a big job. Fortunately, they're not united against us, but a hawk will always have an easier time finding partners there than anyone describable as a dove. (Military/intelligence people, as individuals, often use politics and political connections to advance their personal careers at the expense of their competitors in the biz, which leads to special problems.)

[This post partially transferred from a dead thread]

Posted by: John Emerson on September 9, 2006 12:45 PM

I'm actually sort of surprised to hear your suggestion, Matt.

I'm all in favor of international intstitutions in a theoretical sense, I agree with not only a less unilateral, but a less heavy-handed and militarist foreign policy, and I think the UN gets way too much bad press - but nevertheless I don't see this policy as having wings.

How do you overcome the fact that every time an election occurs, US "commitments", "strategies" and "policies" of deliberate acceptance of international constraint, is up for sale? What are the chances that this emphasis will ultimately last longer than Jimmy Carter's? How do you innure it from setbacks, maybe involving the loss of American life, creating political pressure to roll the whole thing up?

I like international institutions, but I don't see how they'll be able to be created from scratch and significantly empowered beyond now. We're not the only imperalists in the world by a longshot, and the result of that is the regular paralysis of the UN Security Council. This strategy could at best be pursued incrementally - and in the meantime you'll need something else to advocate for America's immediate crises in the ME.

Furthermore, while America and other powers' repeated inventerventions and security, stability and oil interests in the Middle East have been unhelpful to avoiding radical currents and violent conflict, there really is a lot more wrong with the Arab world than that, and you're wrong if you ignore it. The US did not demand the Hama massacre in Syria or the Sudanese massacres in Darfur, and the imbalanced, corrupt, petroleum welfare states of the Gulf, while we did not infuence their development wisely, we are less responsible for them than their actual creators.

It may be true that we cannot singlehandedly transform these countries, and it's almost certainly true that military force should not be the prime element for doing so - but we certainly can be an important positive influence.

Here's a specific example for you: the problems of the Iranian government stem not only from 1953 and from our dependence on the Shah in the 70's, but our stonewalling cold isolation to Iran in the post-revolution years.

International institutions wouldn't hurt, but we don't need them to win the war and midwife the era of political islam.

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